Community is King

The most striking difference between PostgreSQL and MySQL may not be technical at all. Open-source projects are, by definition, all about the community. The community of developers that create and contribute to open-source projects make them come to life. Essentially, there are two different kinds of open-source communities.

First, there are pure open-source database projects that are organized around independent and self-funding communities. PostgreSQL is the oldest and largest independent open-source database community of this kind. The benefit of such a community is true vendor independence.

On the other hand, the second kind of open-source community may have a vendor that controls the project and the project could potentially be "purchased." MySQL is one such example. The MySQL project was initially funded and controlled by MySQL AB, a commercial company that employed all the key developers and architects of MySQL. The MySQL community has more recently been controlled by Sun and now Oracle.

Jim Mlodgenski is Chief Architect at EnterpriseDB. Jim is one of EnterpriseDB's first employees, having joined the company in May 2005. Over the years, Jim has been responsible for key activities such as sales engineering, professional services, strategic technology solutions delivery and customer education. Prior to joining EnterpriseDB, Jim was a partner and architect at Fusion Technologies, a technology services company. For nearly a decade, Jim developed early designs and concepts for Fusion's consulting projects, and specialized in Oracle application development, Web development and open-source information architectures. He can be reached at jim.mlodgenski@enterprisedb.com.